The 7 Best Movies New to Netflix in October 2021

7. “The Holiday” (2006)

Sadly, the only good shot of co-star Eli Wallach available was this one of the back of his head. But the friendship his Old Hollywood screenwriter character forms with Kate Winslet’s frustrated journalist in Nancy Meyers’ film is one of the most delightful subplots of any rom-com this century.

You know the basic contours of the plot: Winslet, London-based and in a toxic workplace faux-romance with the always creepy-sexy Rufus Sewell, trades homes with Cameron Diaz’s Tinseltown trailer-cutter and all parties find reinvigoration and renewal. Diaz ends up meeting, and falling in love with, delightful single-dad Jude Law in the English countryside, while Winslet goes head over heels for Jack Black as a Hollywood movie composer. It’s all fun and light and full of good cheer, and who isn’t already looking for a little Christmas spirit after this 2021?

Even better: it has a charming Hanukkah celebration that sees Winslet’s Iris getting together with her new friend Wallach and some of his Old Hollywood pals. Maybe it’s a little cheesy that Wallach’s character is literally supposed to have added the “kid” to “Here’s looking at you, kid” in “Casablanca,” but that’s certainly a forgivable offense.

6. “Serendipity” (2001)

Oh, Kate Beckinsale, why couldn’t “Serendipity” have launched a new rom-com renaissance for the ages? This movie, bizarrely dissed upon release (check out that one-and-a-half-star Roger Ebert review), is an absolute charmer with some interesting grace notes: it’s the rare rom-com that asks why we ourselves create so many impediments to being happy.

Perhaps people just got hung up on the premise: Beckinsale, a clinical therapist, is adamant that fate is a controlling part of our lives, and if she’s “meant” to be with the cute New Yorker (John Cusack) she’s just met while fighting over a pair of gloves at Bloomingdale’s, then they should, say… get in separate elevators at the Waldorf and see if they push the button for the same floor. If they don’t, well, maybe they’re not meant to be together.

I know, that sounds obnoxious and annoying. But it’s not really about a psycho who’s obsessed with fate — it’s that she has a whole other life going on in San Francisco, and can she really just drop everything for this guy she’s just met? Years pass, and both Beckinsale and Cusack’s characters wonder what might have been if they had ended up together. 

“Serendipity” is a movie about “what might have been” and that makes it universally relatable, even if the particulars of its plot seem a tad contrived. That said, any movie that has a plot hinging on a Gabriel García Márquez first edition, Jeremy Piven playing a New York Times obituary writer, Eugene Levy as a fussbudget Bloomingdale’s salesman, and John Corbett as basically Kenny G has to be a great one.

5. “Gladiator” (2000)

With apologies to Joker and Freddie Quill, Commodus still marks the most unnerving Joaquin Phoenix performance of his career. A libertine who kills his father, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris), menaces his sister (Connie Nielsen) with incestuous advances, and really, really gets off on gladiatorial gore, he is a villain for the ages. 

You know the story: Commodus strips his father’s best general, Maximus (Russell Crowe), of his position, kills Maximus’ family, and throws him into the gladiatorial pits, where he actually rises to fame and glory — potentially as a challenger to Commodus’ rule. It’s an exceptionally exciting movie, and it finally lent a cache of cool to us high school nerds who signed up for Latin class.

Ridley Scott nailed the best mixture of seriousness and silliness for any sword-and-sandles epic since “Ben-Hur.” Or at least since Anthony Mann’s also-excellent “The Fall of the Roman Empire” (1964), which tells much of the same story of “Gladiator,” down to a deranged Christopher Plummer as Commodus. Love “Gladiator”? Check that one out too (for a rental fee on YouTube and Apple TV+). 

4. “Step Brothers” (2008)

Another movie with a rotten Tomatometer score (just like “Serendipity”) that deserved a warmer appreciation, “Step Brothers” has legitimately become a beloved fave. Its climactic setpiece, the Catalina Wine Mixer, has now become a real event, a testament to the ultimate impact of the Will Ferrell- and John C. Reilly-starring, Adam McKay-directed comedy.

When the film came out in 2008, it was marketed heavily as Ferrell and Reilly going to war with each other after their single parents (with whom they, jobless, still live with as 40-year-olds) decide to marry. But it quickly dispenses with that elevator-pitch idea to go in some very unexpected directions.

As pictured above, Kathryn Hahn delivers a fearless performance as the wife of Ferrell’s younger brother (a putrid, Bluetooth-headset-wearing Adam Scott), who begins a much-deserved, much-needed affair with Reilly’s character. The whole cast is terrific, down to Mary Steenburgen and Richard Jenkins as the parents who set everything in motion. Roger Ebert said “Step Brothers” made him feel “a little unclean,” but for most people watching it, you’ll only be unclean because of spittakes from laughing so hard.

3. “Zodiac” (2007)

One of David Fincher’s greatest achievements, “Zodiac” isn’t just a procedural thriller about the hunt for the serial killer who terrorized northern California in the ’60s and ’70s, it’s a movie about everyone’s relationship to these kind of headline-grabbing true-crime stories. The strange ways in which someone like San Francisco Chronicle political cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) can become obsessed enough with the crimes to turn over a good portion of his life to trying to solve it. Or how someone can get off on acting like they’re the killer just to get that thrill of scaring somebody (as in one of the movie’s most terrifying sequences).

It’s hard to see how Bong Joon Ho’s “Memories of Murder” wasn’t an influence on Fincher’s film. The rapid-fire changes in tone, the attention to procedural minutiae, the frequent framings of characters through rain-slicked glass. But it’s all Fincher in its exploration of obsession: Just why is true-crime so popular? Because, on some level, we know death is the thing that most gives our lives meaning. And only Fincher has explored why these stories captivate, transfix, and, yes, even comfort us, the way they do.

2. “Titanic” (1997)

I may not go as far as the previous author of this column, David Ehrlich, in saying that “‘Titanic’ is better than any Shakespeare play ever” (a real quote once heard in the IndieWire office), but it is an astonishingly great film by any measure. One of those rarities that’s so great, you know you’re probably never going to see its likes again — what since has come close for sheer sweep, for such romance, for such chemistry between its leads? Let alone such a persuasive and powerful mix of practical effects and CGI?

“Titanic” is one of those movies that can speak to everyone. It was Kim Jong-Il’s favorite movie (and he actually produced a North Korean remake). You can also read whatever you want in it: Celine Sciamma told Vox she used “Titanic” as a reference point when making “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”

“‘Titanic’ is the hugest success, and it’s because it’s totally queer,” Sciamma said. “Leonardo DiCaprio was totally androgynous at the time. DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were both not known — not stars — so there was no power dynamic between them. Like, if you look at the sex scene in ‘Titanic,’ she’s on top. … I thought a lot about ‘Titanic’ because it’s also the present of a love story and the memory of a love story. A successful love story should not be about eternal possession. No, it should be about emancipation. And it is an emancipation story, because maybe [Kate Winslet’s character in ‘Titanic’] lost this love, but we see her being free and riding horses and wearing pants.”

That reading just goes to show: even when you think everything that could be said about “Titanic” has been said, there are still new ways to think — and feel — about this staggering movie. 

1. “Malcolm X” (1992)

I’ve said before that “iconic” is the most overused word in film journalism; it used to be that some publications even banned the word. But the task that Denzel Washington had before him when he took on the role of the civil rights activist was nothng less than having to become an icon. An icon in the sense that much of his performance that follows is about the instantaneous conveyance of power and influence. There’s that great moment where Malcolm, after a speech, wordlessly tells his standing-at-attention followers, to march toward a police station where one of their own is being held. All he does is raise a gloved hand, then tilt his index finger in the direction they’re to follow. Power.

So much of Washington’s performance, one of the greatest ever put on screen, is built around Malcolm X’s actual speeches, which is an extremely difficult thing to do: to just be monologuing to a camera for extended sequences, without playing off other actors. It actually is about recreating an “icon” in cinematic form and getting to the idea of what an icon means in the first place.

Only Spike Lee could have made this sprawling, 201-minute movie. And some of his images have the power of fable: the giant full-moon hanging like the Death Star in the sky when Klansmen burn Malcolm’s family home; the brilliant colors and peacocking zoot suits worn at Boston’s Roseland ballroom (the best Lindy-hopping sequence put on film since the 1930s); the purifying desert wind around the Kaaba. “Malcolm X” is a great movie — and more.